Time and money are the issue: During the latter seasons of the TNG restoration, Mojo, one of the original, Emmy-Winning VFX artists on Voyager, who, at the time, was still in possession of many of the original DS9 and Voyager VFX assets, did a re-rendering VFX test on footage from "The Sacrifice of Angels." The test really looked spectacular, and proved it could be done. There aren't even plans to restore the shows for streaming purposes.īurnett did note that it would be possible to restore Deep Space Nine and Voyager, noting that tests have been done and they look great. Restoring Deep Space Nine and Voyager, which were never as popular as The Next Generation, would be the equivalent of throwing millions of dollars into a black hole. The sets underperformed and audiences simply made do with the standard definition episodes available to stream on Netflix. Unfortunately, the Blu-ray sets arrived as streaming was starting to take hold and physical media sales began to dwindle. It's one of the great accomplishments in all of film and television restoration, period. Seeing The Next Generation look cinematic rather than fuzzy and cheap is mind-blowing. Like the high definition restorations of the original series, it looks like a whole new show. The original edits would be adhered to exactly, but all the original negative would have to be rescanned, the VFX re-composed, the footage re-color-timed, certain VFX, such as phaser blasts and energy fields, recreated in CG, and the entire soundtrack, originally only finished in 2 channel stereo, would be remastered into thunderous, 7.1 DTS.Īnd if you've seen the Next Generation Blu-rays, you know that they look nothing short spectacular. Essentially, all 178 episodes of TNG (176 if you're watching the original versions of "Encounter at Farpoint" and "All Good Things") would have to go through the entire post-production process AGAIN. In other was a difficult, arduous process that cost a lot of money and took years to finish: So a radical notion was proposed.why not go back to the original negative and REBUILD the entire show, from from the ground up, in High Definition? In the history of television, this had never been done before.
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So the task of bringing The Next Generation to high definition was downright Herculean – the remastering process meant tracking down the 35mm negative for all 178 episodes of the series and literally reconstructing every episode from scratch, using the video edits as a guide. Those shows originally shot on 35mm, with a 20 megapixel resolution, were never to be seen again if finished on tape. True blacks, stable reds and rich blues simply didn't exist on videotape. However, NO FILM NEGATIVE WAS CUT, so the final product would only exist on videotape, at NTSC's greatly reduced video resolution and color. A program could be shot on 35mm film, but instead of editing on film and then cutting negative, the original 35mm material footage would instead be scanned to videotape - at NTSC resolution, and the rest of the post-production process, editing, mixing, etc., would then be completed on tape, at a reduced cost. Now, a new post-production methodology, once existing only for shows originating on videotape, like soap operas and talk shows, could now be applied to shows shot originally on film. In the mid-1980s, the advent of cheaper and cheaper computing technology allowed video post-production to grow more and more sophisticated.